A blog by Jeremy Parnell

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Visualizing wifi through light paintings

It’s invisible and pervasive, filling the areas around us until those moments when we absolutely need it and it’s nowhere to be found. Sure, I just described air, but what my laptop needs to breathe is wifi. As a team from Olso who visualized wifi using a measuring rod with 80 LED light points on it said, “The city is filled with an invisible landscape of networks that is becoming an interwoven part of daily life.” Their project Immaterials: Light painting WiFi “explores the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces”. The lights on the LED rod responds to measured Received Signal Strength (RSSI) of a various networks as they walk through the city, while they capture the light paintings on film through long-exposure photography.